Snow White and Rose Red
by Clodius Pulcher
Summary: War has a thing for white wings...
1. The Night Before

**SNOW WHITE AND ROSE RED**

**_The Night Before_  
**

**~o~O~o~  
**

_This was prompted by Gogol, because she is _always_ guilty.__  
_

**~o~O~o~**

Flaming swords did not belong in bookshops. As far as fundamental truths went, this one was pretty fundamental. Flaming sword. Flames. _Books._ I mean, came the unwary thought, it's a very nice flaming sword, nothing against flaming swords as such, in fact I used to own one, in fact probably _that_ one, but –

– and it did complement her hair, that blazing tumble of blood-streaked copper that any epic poet worth his salt would've hammered into an extended simile for a hero's spear (not a shield, and you wouldn't want to see the images on a shield like _that_) –

– but it was a bookshop. Full of _books._

_And_ it wasn't even in the thirty minutes when the shop was open.**[1]**

"What are you doing?" yelped Aziraphale, a miracle leaping to his fingertips. Behind him, a row of still-uncatalogued _Beanoes_ quivered on the shelf. "Put that out at once!"

War grinned her glamorous scarlet grin. "Just visiting, angel," she purred, her voice the subdued roar of several thousand horsemen hammering towards an anvil of the poor bloody infantry. Or possibly (and this thought surprised Aziraphale, when it appeared uninvited in his head) drums from some wild and uninhibited gathering, the sort where fights break out on the fringes but everyone within the circle of the fires is having far too good a time to notice. There was alcohol in that voice, and sex. And violence, of course, but that was a given.

"There's something about white wings," she added. "White shows up the stains so well..."

She was _still_ waving that flaming sword around!

He said, nervously, "Why don't you put the sword down? And then we can, we can, catch up – yes, catch up – over a nice cup of tea –"

"Over a nice cup of 1982 Romanee-Conti," said War, her grin stretching wider. The sword was quenched with a hiss as she sheathed it. "Dinner's on me."**[2]**

.**  
**

* * *

.

**[1]** Aziraphale regretted ever having to flip the sign on the door to 'open' at all, but the tax forms were complicated enough as it was. Precisely when these minutes fell was, of course, arbitrary.

**[2]** Literally. It was remarkably hard to sober up, Aziraphale later discovered, between the breasts of War.


	2. The Morning After

**SNOW WHITE AND ROSE RED**

**_The Morning After_  
**

**~o~O~o~  
**

_Another snippet courtesy of Gogol's prompts, because who needs sleep anyway?_

**~o~O~o~**

The first thing Crowley saw on entering the bookshop (which had been shut, at half ten on a Wednesday morning, not that this surprised him at all: knowing Aziraphale's irregular hours, or, rather, minutes, he'd have been surprised to find it open) was what looked like a heap of white feathers where Aziraphale's desk used to be.

Well... _mostly_ white. There was the odd splash of red that might have been wine, or, then again, might not have been. A tremor ran through them as the door, jangling, slammed shut.

The second thing Crowley saw was a pair of slim feet sticking out from the feathers. They definitely didn't belong to Aziraphale. Not unless Aziraphale shaved his legs, anyway.

The third thing Crowley saw (the lenses of his dark glasses were dripping from their frames by this point) was copper hair spilling down the desk in a bloody torrent... and then War lifted her head from the desk and gave him her patented scarlet smile, the one that should have been sucking cherries from cocktail sticks in some slinky bar on some sunny island while strong men fought each other for a glance of her orange eyes.

"Hi," she said. "So you're the demon."

"I," said Crowley blankly. "Uh. I –"

A groan emerged from the disordered feather-heap. "Oh, my _head_..."

"Aziraphale," said Crowley, disbelieving despite the lack of dark glass in front of his face, "Aziraphale, is that you?"

The feathers twitched. "Mph..."

War extricated herself with a slither so sinuous that Crowley would have been obliged to admire it for atavistic reasons, even if he hadn't already been very obviously admiring completely different attributes. "What a _gentleman_," she purred, somehow acquiring the barest minimum of garments in approximately two seconds and a great deal of tantalising but expertly non-explicit skin. Well, there might have been a hint of nipple in there somewhere. Nothing seemed to be registering very clearly for Crowley at the moment. "I knew the angel would only have _respectable_ friends."

"Guh," said Crowley, who had generally escaped accusations of respectability during his demonic career and would probably have faced a reprimand if anyone below him in the lowerarchy had been listening in at that exact moment.

She was pulling on her boots: leather to the thigh, stiletto spikes five inches at the least. "Let's do this again sometime," she said to the quivering feathers. "Say, next Wednesday?"

"Mph..."

War gave him a lick of a kiss that smeared scarlet lipstick over the white feathers without, Crowley was just capable of noticing, smudging her perfect smile in the slightest. She bent to pick up a sword in its sheath from the floor.

"See you around," she said, with a wink that wiped out what remained of Crowley's higher brain functions, and stalked out.

Silence followed, mostly because Crowley was occupied with trying to pick up his jaw. After a moment, Aziraphale's wings parted and the angel's pallid face appeared. He looked rather as though he was about to throw up.

They stared at each other.

"Um," said Aziraphale. "Uh."

A skimpy garment lay crumpled beneath the desk. Their eyes fell on it at the same moment. It was red and lacy. War had left her knickers behind.

She had left her _knickers_ behind. In the angel's bookshop.

Crowley took a deep breath.

"You lucky _bastard_," he said. "You lucky, lucky, _lucky_ bastard!"


End file.
